Hey guys, so all of my electronics came in today and now I'm really anxious to solder them all together...
Basically I'm doing this setup: 1 Piezo, 1 Humbucker, a 3 way switch, and a volume pot.
The problem is... I'm a complete wiring NEWBIE!
I kind of have the basics down on which wire goes where according to this chart...
http://i645.photobucket.com/albums/uu176/Brenderson/Screenshot2011-...
I really have no idea about what the whole "ground" stuff is... Can someone explain to me what I do with all of the ground wires? Where do I solder them to?
Thanks!
Tags:
Hi Brendon,
The GND on the diagram just means a ground wire and they normally don't add a full wire as the diagram looks a bit too crowded. For a guitar most people suggest using a star type of grounding - all grounds go to a single point (usually the back of the volume pot as it is a nice big site to solder to) and then only one wire goes from here to the ground of the output jacksocket.
Adding the wires the diagram looks like this
Points to note on the diagram - the volume pot has the lug on the right (the only one not connected to a wire) bent up and soldered to the pot casing. At the ouput jack the hot wire (red in this diagram) connects to the lug which makes contact with the very tip of the jackplug (if you insert a cable jackplug it will be easy to see which one).
Adding an extra ground wire to a metal bridge can help to reduce the hum you sometimes get by grounding the strings although it may not be necessary as you are using a humbucker.
The corners don't need grounding.
Good luck,
David
PS wear glasses and long sleeves as the solder sometimes spits.
Thanks you guys! That definitely helped simplify things... for some reason I had a super complex idea of grounding and was overthinking it.
Anyways, a few more questions...
1. If I go to buy wire at Home Depot, do I need to make sure I get the correct wire types? Or will any wire work for any situation (For example would a Hot wire work for Grounding)?
2. David, the ground wire from the jack is connected to the lug or is not? Or is is soldered to the back of the volume pot like the others? I'm a bit confused on that one connection.
3. The pickup I got is the GFS PAF Humbucker... It has 5 wires. It has a Green (Which I believe is the Hot in this case), a Black (Ground), a Red and White (which are soldered together already), and a silver braided wire.
If the green hot wire is going to the 3 way, and the black ground is going to the volume pot shell, where do the Red/White combo go? And where does the silver braided wire go?
Also what are these wires (red/white and silver braided) for?
Thanks!
Hi Brendon,
The same wire can be used for all the wiring - if you used shielded wire it does cut down on the electrical hum that the wires can pick up (it depends upon how much the background hum bothers you).
The jack socket ground lug is wired to the back of the volume pot in the diagram so all the other grounds going to the back of the pot are each grounded but only via the one wire to stop ground loops forming.
The humbucker you have is made from 2 separate coils each of which have their own start and finish which gives 4 wires - the extra bare wire is the shield for the cable to cut out electrical noise from other electrical equipment in the locality. This gives you different coil wiring options - series (wired: hot-north coil-south coil-ground) / split (only 1 coil wired) / parallel (each coil is wired between hot and ground) all of which give different tonal qualities.
If you look on the Seymour Duncan website you will see the huge choice you have in wiring these type of humbuckers
http://www.seymourduncan.com/support/wiring-diagrams/
David
The way I do it is to bend that lug up so it touches the side of the pot and then put a blob of solder over where they meet. it is then grounded to the jack (along with all the others) via the single earth wire to the jack.
If you prefer you can use a small wire from this lug upto the top of the pot - either works.
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